Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on December 2010

If you were to go wading through the plot of this two-hour Christina Aguilera music video, you wouldn’t get your toenails wet. And the storyline was old before they invented talkies. Aguilera plays a small-town Iowa girl who heads for El Lay to make it in the singing and dancing biz. She wheedles a job waitressing in a (magically size-shifting) girlie club that’s so sanitized it could be a Disneyland attraction, works her way up to star singer/dancer, and then devises a clever way to save the old place from evil bankers, etc. It helps that the non-aging Cher plays the club’s beleaguered owner and gets in a few songs herself (without discernibly moving her face). Stanley Tucci is the obligatory gay stage manager, and Alan Cumming provides a little weirdness. Aguilera has the dancing chops and a helluva set of pipes, but she must have left her acting skills in Iowa. So if thin plots, stale tales and some hilariously clunky dialogue don’t worry you, you’re in for some fairly good hoofin’ and hollerin’ in a film that by general agreement sets a new standard for makeup-based cinema.